#THENOBULLMAMA

WHY ‘M’ IS NOT JUST FOR MOTHER…

Happy Mother’s Day people. Hope you’re all being spoiled silly and left to languish in bed for as long as you damn well please. I hope that you’ll have a chance to read a newspaper from front to back and drink a whole cup of tea while it’s still hot. I hope the house is spotless, the beds are made and the loo seats are all clean and down. I hope you can do whatever you like but (and this may seem a little ironic) I really hope that you can spend some time on Mothers Day not being a mum; I hope you can spend some time just being you because when it comes down to it, being a mum is what you are, not who you are. Mothers Day is great and I love that it’s an opportunity for every other human (big and small) in the house to stop for a hot minute and recognise all the stuff I overthink for them. I love that, even if they’re too small to fully understand it yet, we are sowing seeds of gratitude in their tiny brains so that, one day not long from now, they won’t grow up to be unappreciative little ratbags. I love that even if it’s short lived, I get a reprieve from being ‘mum’ for one day and get to be ‘me’.

The job of ‘mum’ isn’t an easy one after all. The only qualification required is that you have a small human that relies on you for, well, staying alive and generally happy. There’s zero training and no, having a puppy does not count unless that puppy spends 23 hours of the day chewing on your nipples until they bleed and honestly, the perks are few and far between. Sure those little munchkins that you shove out of your love tunnel are cute as buttons, but they’re hard work. They never wipe their own bum, eat their own food, tidy their own mess, make their own meals/beds, wash their own clothes/faces/hair/teeth. They’re not great at communication – listening skills are selective and verbally they range from “Mum, mum, mum, mum, mum…” to, “No” usually at high volume. It’s tough.

In fact, these adorable mini-mes are so time consuming that I bet you can barely remember the last time you had a bath without the underlying anxiety that one of them was going to bowl in and join you, or wake up screaming because their blanket feels a bit purple. When did you last pick up a copy of Grazia and lose yourself in those glossy, gossip-filled pages of glamorous women who haven’t ever been introduced to a snot-globule-in-their-hair situation? A cup of coffee that you haven’t reheated 3 times? An hour to actually do your hair and make up? A yoga session? Lunch with a girlfriend?

Well, this Mothers Day, maybe that’s exactly what we should be doing. Sure the presents are nice, but I know that I would always prefer an afternoon in a clean and tidy house by myself with only a magazine, Netflix, a cup of coffee and Instagram to keep my company. It may seem weird that, on Mothers Day, we crave time to not be a mother but when you think about it, it isn’t weird at all. Being a mum is hard work and if you can carve out a few responsibility-free hours then so you should.

The team over at Pampers also agree and have put together gifts and treats on their app not just for your little ones but also for you. Between the 8th and 14th March, they are offering double points on the Pampers App on all Pampers purchases which means you’ll be able to treat yourself to all sorts of cool stuff, including, if you so wish, a three month subscription to Grazia (sign me up). After all, if you have to spend your hard earned cash on well-crafted, wearable vessels for your teeny-tiny darlings to pee and poop into, the least you can expect is something in return, right?

So, while you’re sipping on your hot cup of coffee and browsing Instagram, take a minute to download the Pampers app and start treating yourself, direct from your phone, right now because, after all, ‘M’ isn’t just for ‘mum’, it’s also for ‘me’.